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Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.

Aldo Leopold

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Aldo Leopold
Age: 60 †
Born: 1887
Born: January 1
Died: 1948
Died: January 1
Academic
Author
Botanical Collector
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Forestry Scientist
Naturalist
Philosopher
University Teacher
Burlington
Iowa
Aldo Starker Leopold
Rand Aldo Leopold
Action
Maximum
Doe
Yield
Right
Cease
Profit
Argument
Condoned
Pay
Intimidated
Impossible
Profits
Wrong
Pays

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Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
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In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
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All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
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A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
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Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
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Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind I have no hope for conservation born of fear.
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It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it
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How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.
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Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
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The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
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I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing.
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I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.
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Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
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There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.
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The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.
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Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
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For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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